


Thisbe and Eurydice

by Writerslovecoffee



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Assassination Plot(s), Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Evil Institute (Fallout 4), F/F, Fallout 4 Spoilers, Forbidden Love, Friendship/Love, Mild Gore, Mild Smut, Original Character(s), Spoilers, The Institute (Fallout), The Railroad (Fallout), Useless Lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27677066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writerslovecoffee/pseuds/Writerslovecoffee
Summary: *based off of a fallout 4 cosplay on tiktok*Dr. Diane Bates is the newest appointed scientist in the Bioscience division. She comes from nearly seven generations inside the Institute and has spent years training for her position, however, her loyalty to the Institute is put to the test when she’s asked to aid in a Courser Replacement Surgery.X9-26 was picked against her will to become a courser. She’s supposed to be tough. Cold. Rational. And yet something inside her feels broken when she sees Dr. Bates. Anger? Betrayal? Love?Both are trying to prove their allegiance to the Institute, and there’s no way that a synth and a human would be allowed to fall in love and allowed to live.
Relationships: Original Characters - Relationship, Synth Character(s) (Fallout)/Original Female Character(s)





	Thisbe and Eurydice

**Author's Note:**

> Names are dumb and stupid and confusing. Here’s a lil footnote to help all of us with that, in case you’re not really in the fandom or it’s been a while since you played the game or you just need a refresher.
> 
> Dr. Bates is the OC protagonist.
> 
> Dr. Volkert is in charge of the medical center (general injuries, health, medicine).
> 
> Dr. Ayo is in charge of the SRB (Synth Retention Bureau (he’s basically X9’s boss)).
> 
> Dr. Holdren is Dr. Bate’s boss.
> 
> Anybody else that gets mentioned is probably not that important.
> 
> There are 4 main divisions: Bioscience (food, medicine, genetics), Robotics (makes the synths), SRB (makes sure the synths don’t run away), and Advanced Systems (computers, guns, lasers, the main generator, basically any kind of computer building).
> 
> 2 minor divisions that really don’t matter: facilities (repairs) and medical (exactly what it sounds like.
> 
> Synths (specifically Gen 3) are synthetic humans. They’re made in a lab. Coursers are Gen 3 synths 2.0. Anything before 3 is just a robot. 
> 
> Okay great thanks, that’s literally all you need to know, I’ll explain the rest as we go.

_R9-26._

She was created in 2284, nearly three years ago. Brown hair, blue eyes, average synth model build. No major mutations. She worked in Advanced Systems. During her time, she helped install and maintain much of the wiring throughout the Institute. She was mostly seen with synth classifications P4-69 and V2-01. She had several marks on her file for disobedience, but nothing major. Just misdemeanors like disorderly conduct. She had gotten in trouble for attempting to have intimate relations with another synth (the other culprit being P4, which left her with barely a slap on the wrist simply out of morbid curiosity), immodest dress code after using office pens to draw makeup on her face, and not behaving appropriately during work hours, but she had never shown evidence of a wish to defect. She seems happy to be here. When they programmed her personality, they must've done something to make her brain produce more serotonin than the others. I've never seen a Gen 3 synth laugh the way that she laughs.

And I'm realizing as I'm staring at the back of her head, I'm going to have to kill her.

She was eating lunch in the cafeteria with P4 and V2. I carefully approached as for her to not see me and the two Gen 2's I brought with me. V2 saw me first. I watched as her eyes widened with horror. P4 looked confused at best.

For half a second, I found myself hesitating to say her recall code. Her memories would be wiped, her body shut down except for the most basic survival requirements. For half a second, I wondered if my own loyalty would be taken into question. "Tango-4-7-Omicron." I said out loud.

R9's body buckled in her seat. The top half of her body collapsed onto the table into her food. V2 screamed, flying backwards out of her seat. Everyone else in the cafeteria stopped talking to turn in our direction. "You killed her!" She shouted at me.

My jaw locked together. _I'm sorry,_ I wanted to say. _I'm sorry for killing your friend. I'm sorry about not giving you a warning. I'm sorry for scaring you._ But you're not supposed to apologize the the Gen 3's. The idea that their brains could even handle the idea hearing that their superiors were in the wrong would give them an unwarranted ego boost, and that's bad for their development. "V2, I'm going to have to ask you to contain yourself, before I have to have you sedated." I told her. I felt my voice waver, but she returned to her seat in shock.

The Gen 2's were scooping up the synth's body. Her chest was still rising and falling, but her eyes were shut and her face had grown pale. She was stiff as a board as they carried her out.

The surgery center was already set up. We had little time to get started before the failsafe on her chip failed, and the fact that she's clinically brain dead. The failsafe was to make sure that if a synth needed to be interrogated, but also incapacitated, there was a short period of time after the recall code was called before their memories were totally wiped.

"Ready to get started, Dr. Bates?" Dr. Volkert, head of medical, was smiling behind his mask. He seemed awfully cheerful given the circumstances. He was already sterile.

"Of course." I replied. I scrubbed my arms until it felt like the skin would fall off. One of the techs helped me into my gloves while Volkert propped her up in a chair. R9 looked so calm and peaceful. I wondered if it would be cruel to wake her up. That thought was interrupted by the fact that she had to be physically restrained in case the chip worked too well and she became violent upon waking up. 

There was the head doctor in black from the SRB, Dr. Ayo, with the new chip, over in the corner. They had already set up a computer to download and transfer the information over and were working alongside the scientists in orange from Robotics, who were always a bit sad to be handing over one of their own to the SRB. There were people in blue from Advanced Systems in case the computers crashed. My supervisor, Dr. Holdren, from Bioscience was in green. Courser procedures always seemed to bring the best of us together, no matter how badly we talked behind each other's backs.

Metal bars were used to prop up her neck. A tube ran down her throat to keep her chest inflating and a special blanket wrapped around her chest to keep her body's temperature regulated. Volkert let me do the IV. There were so many eyes on me, it felt like it was the only thing I knew how to do exactly right. He kept looking at me with the same _"don't fuck this up for me"_ look.

"I'm going to shave away the hair at the base of the neck." Volkert announced loudly, cuing that the procedure was beginning. The doctors from all four fields nodded and gave him the go ahead. He used the clippers to create a bald spot at the base of her neck. He didn't seem to have much regard to how ugly it looked. Synths didn't usually have this much hair. Welocated the chip at the base of her brain and sanitized the area.

"Dr. Volkert," I whispered quietly, as to not disturb the others working in the room. "Since her chip is still installed, is she going to feel any pain? She she aware that this is happening?" I tried to keep my voice light. Curious, not concerned. Not for my sake, of course, her friends would likely be coming to us with questions while she was in recovery.

He cut his eyes at me. "It's a _synth."_ Was all he replied with as he began cutting into her. I was in charge of cauterizing. Her body didn't flinch. Perhaps she couldn't feel this after all. Just behind her occipital bone, was what looked like a tiny lightbulb the size of my thumb. Small enough to not even set off metal detectors. The purple light on it was flickering aggressively. "Alright, here, we've located the chip."

Dr. Ayo nodded. "You've done this before, Dr. Volkert,but let me remind you, the blue wire goes in slot A--"

"Red in B, Purple in C, and Yellow in D." I interrupted. He gave me a nasty look. The synth didn't react until the last wire plugged in and her entire body jerked like a bolt of electricity surged through her. Did she feel that? She wasn't under any anesthesia.

"Right, beginning the transfer now." The process took about five minutes. All of her memories, and all of her basic functions and instructions were sent over to the courser chip to be built upon. It was my job to keep her vitals stable, which she was proving to handle well.

"Dr. Volkert," I said quietly. "Do you have a spare rag I could use?"

He looked at me puzzled. "What for?"

I pointed at the fact that when her recall code had been called, her face had planted directly into a plate of instant mashed potatoes. "I was just going to--"

"Fine." He begrudgingly handed me a rag and mumbled something about the sterile field. She didn't respond to me touching her. I tried to picture her skin, rubbery and plastic, manufactured in a lab. But it was smooth and warm. Too human. Too uncanny.

"Her heart monitor is detecting a discrepancy, it's beginning to drop." Someone noted from the monitors.

"Almost done." The SRB scientist replied. There was a ding and the light in the back of her head lit up red, before turning off completely. I helped Dr. Volkert unscrew it from the plate at the base of her brain. All of her vitals immediately dropped the second it came undone. Then, the new chip was inserted. It looked nearly identical and lit up a bright red color after it screwed in. She began to level out where she was as we closed up the area. Quick. Easy. Painless. And my hands were barely shaking.

"What now?" I asked nervously.

"We turn it back on and see how it responds." Dr. Volkert replied. "It's out of our hands now."

"Tango-4-7-Omicron."

R9's body gave a startled jerk. We had unfastened her neck, causing her head to fall into her chest. Her eyes were blinking, recalibrating. Her face looked wet with something. Synths don't cry, do they? Especially not with a courser chip in. The courser chip likes to weed through a synths weaknesses and eat them up. R9 was going to remember her friends, but lose the connection she had to everyone she ever bonded with. Her emotions would lower to create a more apathetic personality. She would be stronger, smarter, colder, more calculated. Her pain threshold would increase, her libido would decrease. Her overall need for social interactions would plummet.

"R9-26? Can you hear us?" She didn't reply. She was taking slow, deep breaths, her eyes fixated at the floor. She didn't seem to be aware of anyone in the room. "R9?"

"Remember, it can take time for her brain to process all of the new information that she's been given."

She's crying. She's sitting here crying and no one is going to do anything. "She's just been through surgery, maybe she should rest before we start quizzing her on--" I cut in.

"No, we need to make sure that the chip transfer worked." Dr. Ayo stopped me. "R9, we need to hear you respond before you're allowed to leave."

"I'm awake." Her voice said softly. "What--what--what happened to me?" 

"You were selected to have your synth component replaced with a courser chip." Someone in the back explained.

"No one told me?" She asked. Her eyes were looking at all of the faces in the room. "No one asked me what I wanted to do?"

"We know what the best decision is for you, R9." Dr. Ayo replied. "You're going to start going by X9-26 from now on. Training starts as soon as you recover. But for now, you're going to be moved to Courser's quarters."

"How long have you been planning this?" She asked as I untied her wrist and foot restraints. “How long has this been happening? Why did no one tell me?” Her voice was growing more panicked.

"We've been watching you for a while now." Dr. Ayo replied. "We can continue more extensive psychological testing tomorrow. The chip can begin working better once you're over your shock. Someone can show you to your new room to rest now."

I took a step back. I've met coursers. Their eyes are like staring at a computer screen, not lifeless, but as if their brains spend every possible second calculating and spinning numbers around. But I looked at the courser in the chair in front of me. Tears streaked her cheeks. She wasn't calculating anything. The reaction to the surgery must've been like a knee jerk, the tears stemming deep within some biological component, an uncontrollable human flaw. There almost looked to be pain behind her eyes. But synths don't feel real pain. Not the way humans do. It couldn't have been anything more than a bug in her code.

She looked up at me with a more familiar expression to me: _Uncontrollable rage._


End file.
